Fun with SparkLines

December 1, 2008

If you have never heard of a sparkline, they are what Edward Tufte describes as “word sized graphics.” Said another way, they are little charts that you can use in the middle of a paragraph. Said yet another way, they are really cool.

It’s a pretty compact way of seeing whether you are on track in your business or not. I’ll let Colin explain what it all means:

Ones in which invoice totals exceed the specified upper threshold are marked in green, and ones which are lower than the lower threshold are red. Everything else is black. To the side of the graph, there’s a numerical readout of the invoice totals from this month and the previous month, again coloured accordingly.

If you’re interested in using it for yourself, Colin has provided the source.

about the author

FreshBooks is the #1 accounting software in the cloud designed to make billing painless for small businesses and their teams. Today, over 10 million small businesses use FreshBooks to effortlessly send professional looking invoices, organize expenses and track their billable time.